Initiation and the Performance of Occultism a DISSERTATION

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Thinning the Veils: Initiation and the Performance of Occultism A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Performance Studies By Jason Lawton Winslade EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2008 2 © Copyright by Jason Lawton Winslade 2008 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT Thinning the Veils: Initiation and the Performance of Occultism Jason Lawton Winslade Initiation is a performative model that dictates the participation of individuals in the various traditions of Western occultism, locating that individual within a nexus of practices and discourses that facilitate the transmission of occult teachings to that individual. While the act of initiation may be represented by a single performed rite, the paradigmatic aspects of initiation pervade the entirety of Western occultism, so that practitioners’ encounters with textuality and language, history, magical action, ritual performance, and political activism are interpreted as initiatic experiences. The initiation rite itself is a structured performance in which practitioners actively engage with these aspects of occult knowledge. Correspondingly, the process of initiation also becomes a descriptive metaphor for a candidate’s training in these knowledges. Accordingly, the dissertation identifies these occult knowledges as initiatic discourses, in which the use of initiatory metaphor is crucial to a practitioner’s understanding of occultism. Initiatic discourse refers to a particular way of engaging with knowledge, language, symbols, and experience that actively emphasizes the practitioner’s ability to respond to and mold these discourses. In turn, these discourses are said to transform the practitioner through gnosis, defined by esotericism scholar Arthur Versluis as “experiential insight into the nature of the divine as manifested in the individual and in the cosmos” ( Restoring Paradise 1-2). I argue that this engagement with occult discourse and practice is at its core a performance experience, in which practitioners make various performative moves that enhance their participation in the nexus of 4 occultism. Further, I maintain that the academic study of occultism itself is imbued with notions of the performative through an initiatic paradigm. Therefore, the dissertation identifies occultism as a field of inquiry that can be significantly illuminated through the application of performance studies. 5 Preface When I began writing about occultism, ritual magic, and Paganism in 1996, I was not able to locate much scholarly material on these topics that was to my liking. Historical analyses were dry, uninteresting and often inaccurate. 1 Ethnographies were scarce and seemed to weigh heavily against practitioners, portraying them as irrational or silly. On the other hand, work written by practitioners was mostly uncritical and, to be honest, not very scholarly. Occult practitioners interested in academic writing on their practice often had to settle for outdated and unsympathetic scholarship. Any hint of association with his or her subject would draw harsh criticism of the scholar’s loss of objectivity. I realized that, being in a performance studies program that encouraged more direct engagement with one’s subject matter, I was in a unique position (or so I thought) of being both a scholar and a practitioner, having been involved in ceremonial magick and Paganism for several years. Since then, much has changed. The field of Western Esotericism has grown into a legitimate branch of Religious Studies. Pagan Studies is now emerging as a subfield of the study of New Religious Movements, with accompanying academic journals and several book series. Scholar/practitioners are becoming almost more of a rule than the exception in Pagan Studies. A colleague of mine in New York is even starting an academic journal to cover specific topics pertaining to spirituality and performance. Given the amount of quality scholarship currently being published on these topics, I have to struggle 1 Throughout this text, I follow recent trends in Pagan studies in using the term Pagan with a capital ‘P’ to refer to contemporary practitioners of various practices associated with Paganism, rather than the former term “neopaganism.” This is mainly because practitioners generally call themselves “Pagans” and not “neopagans,” but also because the latter term implies a false historical continuity with pre-Christian religions. Similarly, I capitalize Witchcraft to denote the contemporary Western religious practice, as opposed to the lower case form that refers to a broader historical and cross-cultural set of practices not necessarily associated with any one religion. 6 considerably less to claim legitimacy for a dissertation on occultism and magic. Yet, I still hope to forge my own way. In Enchanted Feminism , a relatively recent ethnography on the Reclaiming Collective, a well-known feminist witchcraft group based out of San Francisco, the author, Jone Salomonsen, maintains that even though she advocates a deep immersion in the religious experiences of the group one is studying, she “[does] not intend to bring about any further magical currents from having been initiated except this book and its various receptions in the reader” (20). My intentions as a scholar could not have been more different. In between attending a master’s program in Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan and the PhD program in Performance Studies at Northwestern, and under circumstances completely unrelated to academia, I had effectively become a magickal practitioner. 2 Thus when I decided to write about magickal practices, I knew I could not merely write and leave them behind. Rather, I was embarking on a journey in a new city and a new life, beginning (initiating) magickal practices that would change my life for many years to come. Though my daily practice has somewhat lessened from when I began this pursuit in Michigan fifteen years ago, I plan to continue to engage and challenge this spirituality throughout my life. Therefore, my magickal interests ran parallel to my graduate education. Instead of the scholar entering the magickal world, I often felt the opposite: I was a magickal practitioner entering the scholarly world, eventually reading and interpreting the scholarly world in a magickal fashion. Graduate school was my crucible; this dissertation and my experiences while writing it were my initiation. In the PhD program at Northwestern, I faced the dilemma of articulating exactly what I meant by magick and, even more importantly, determining how much I wanted to reveal about 7 my identity and my practices, which were still relatively new to me. My worries seemed confirmed when, at my PhD recital, the late Dwight Conquergood, chair of Performance Studies at the time, jokingly asked if I was going to levitate as part of my performance. Yet, Dr. Conquergood encouraged me to put my beliefs in action through performance. In one of his unforgettable classes, I participated in a group presentation with other students who happened to have ministerial experience in their own spiritual faiths, including an African-American Baptist preacher. At the conclusion of the piece, all of us conferred our individual blessings on some corn bread, re-enacting a scene from a story one of the group members told about working with Appalachian communities. As many who remember Dr. Conquergood would attest, his classes often involved food, and the diverse blessings of this bread were welcomed and celebrated in the classroom, on an intellectual and emotional level. Thus, it was through performance--especially in the performance studies context--that I was able to publicly legitimize a deeply personal belief and practice within a scholarly context. It was the performance studies approach to ethnography as a deep engagement with communities and practices, and the potential to incorporate the complex subjectivity of the performing scholar into writing, that encouraged me to take a practitioner’s stance in my work. My insider status began with my own personal studies and interactions with various magickal communities in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio between 1993 and 1995. After beginning the Ph.D. program at Northwestern in 1995, I had located an individual who had agreed to be a mentor and teacher for my spiritual pursuits, Matthew Ellenwood. 3 With him, I 2 Here, like many other practitioners, I use the ‘k’ spelling to distinguish this strain of the Western esoteric tradition from stage magic. 8 helped form a short-lived, small working group who called themselves “The Kinship of the Braided Oak.” I describe one of their rituals in the dissertation. In 1996, my teacher and I began to attend regular full moon rituals with a nascent group who, at the time, was affiliated with a Unitarian Church on the south side of Chicago. This group, which became known as “Moonbeats,” grew to be extremely popular with local practitioners, their rituals often boasting attendance between sixty and a hundred people at each event and a mailing list three times that size. It was during my time with Moonbeats that I honed my particular ritual skills, since I often played a prominent role in organizing and conducting the rituals, along with Matthew Ellenwood and Teresa Lynch. 4 It was at this time that I also began attending various large Pagan festivals on private land in Indiana, Ohio and New York. In 1999, my interest began to shift towards a group called the Hermetic Order of Chicago. I was immediately taken by the seeming warmth and lack of pretentiousness among the participants. According to its founder, Althea Northage-Orr, the group had been around in one form or other for about twenty-five years and was deeply concerned with individual development on spiritual, emotional and psychological levels. 5 I also learned that the group had their own private land, consisting of forests and ritual spaces, several hours east in Indiana. Everything I found in this group was attractive. Thus, I began to attend the Hermetic Order’s open rituals with 3 Mr.

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